Therapist Says Sex Is Largely in Our Minds

In “Right Brain Sex: Using Creative Visualization to Enhance Sexual Pleasure” (Prentice Hall Press), Los Alamitos sex therapist Carol G. Wells contends that by learning to use the mind’s “full erotic potential, our sex lives can be dramatically changed.”

The book shows how creative visualization can not only help people with sexual problems but can spice up a lackluster sex life.

Wells noted that when most people hear the word visualization they think of “sexual fantasy.” But unlike sexual fantasies, which are explicitly erotic images, she said a visualization doesn’t have to be erotic at all.

“Very few of the visualizations I have in the book are in themselves erotic,” she said. “What they’re designed to do mostly, if you look at them as a whole, is to free people up in their old notions about who they are sexually and move them into a different image of themselves.”

But just as it took years to create those negative images, Wells said, they will not disappear overnight.

“I think a lot of it depends on how much preliminary work you’ve been doing with your life, if you’ve been in therapy for a while,” she said. “But a person picking up the book, I think is going to have to practice that visualization three to four times a week for a couple of months” before they experience a change in their life.

“The notion is that imagery is what dictates our sexuality,” said Wells, 45. “In the mind are contained all our beliefs, attitudes and images about everything, sex included. If we have positive, healthy notions about sexuality, that gets translated to our body and our body responds positively and healthily.

“But it’s very unusual for anybody in our culture to grow up and have all positive, healthy attitudes about sex.”

“Right Brain Sex,” a recent Book of the Month Club selection, is Wells’ first book.

A finalist in the nationwide search to replace Ann Landers when the daily advice columnist left the Chicago Sun-Times in 1987, Wells writes the “Your Sex Life” column for the Long Beach Press-Telegram.

She gained a degree of notoriety in the early ‘80s as creator of “Humanopoly: The Facts of Life Game,” a board game designed to teach children about conception, adolescent sexuality and contraception.

But many stores refused to carry it, Wells said, and the game sold only marginally.

“I think the most difficult issue still hanging us up is the fact that adults have a terrific discomfort with the notion that children have sexuality,” she said. Primitive cultures that have ritualistic sexual rites of passage “don’t know anything about the problems we have today. They don’t have sexual offenders, rape, or erection difficulties or orgasm problems.”

If parents talked openly about sex with their children at an early age, Wells maintains, they wouldn’t be having as many sexual problems as adults.

Wells said a person’s sexual imagery is developed in the years between early infancy and young adulthood--a time in which our culture denies that children have sexual thoughts, feelings or reactions.

“The taboo creates the belief that sex needs to be secretive, stealthy almost, and that creates a lot of inhibitions,” she said. “If things are not going right (in their sexual relationships), what I suggest to people is to rewrite those images or re-create them in a more healthy fashion.”

By so doing, she said, they will be freed up to explore being more uninhibited, loving, spontaneous and playful in their sexual relationships, “to have the kind of sex people lust after and rarely have.”

One of the negative images a man who is unable to get aroused carries with him, for example, is the idea that men are responsible for sex: that they’re in charge of the experience and must perform. “That creates the anxiety which leads to the lack of arousal,” Wells said.

In this case, Wells recommends that the man repeatedly visualize “participating” in the experience--relaxing and receiving pleasure--rather than feeling he must be in charge of it.

Or, Wells said, a woman who feels inhibited sexually because she has negative feelings about lust could imagine herself being comfortable with a lusty image.

It’s the same thing, she said, as a public speaker visualizing a perfect performance by seeing himself as relaxed, competent and capable: “If you (mentally) practice what you want to happen, it happens.

“The point of the book is to make sure people understand that if you change your beliefs and attitudes and images, your body will automatically take care of itself.”

“Right Brain Sex” (a reference to the side of the brain that governs imagination and passion) deals with such “requisites” for sexual satisfaction as concentration, intimate touch, masturbation, lust, play, pleasure and feeling loved. Included are case histories and examples of appropriate visualizations.